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Dictogloss + EnglishCentral = Learning

Dictogloss is an activity that works with many short texts/passages. I’ve used it over the years and it seems to motivate and “work” because there is a built in task — the task of reconstructing the original text.

It is easy to do.

1. Choose an EnglishCentral video that will highly engage your students. Try to keep it no longer than 2-3 minutes. Most of our videos are that length. A dialogue works best.

2. Play the video once without pausing. Just ask the students to relax and take it all in. Subtitles for lower levels. Higher levels, you might not show them.

3. Next, tell them to listen again. This time taking notes, drawing pictures or however they want to record the information. You might even give them a graphic organizer or chart to help categorize information. Pause the video at selected points and replay several times.

4. The students get in groups and try to recreate the exact text from memory. After some trying, you might even reread the passage to help them.

5. Share each others passage and note the differences. Replay the video and they can compare their own to the original.